The increasing demand for wireless telecommunication services has resulted in the growth of many wireless telecommunication systems and increase in the number of roaming wireless subscribers. With newer third generation (3G) systems, efforts have been implemented to accommodate and distribute the increased traffic load in the network. By way of example, for handling communications such as mobile terminated calls (MTC) towards a mobile terminal or mobile originated calls (MOC) from the mobile terminal, a network communication node such as MSC (Mobile Switching Centre) may be provided.
In addition to mobile calls, also location based services (LBS, LCS) which usually require knowledge on a location of the mobile terminal in the communication network may emerge. In order to retrieve the location of the mobile terminal, first a MSC in which the mobile terminal is registered has to be determined. This may be achieved according e.g. to the 3GPP TS 23.271 standard by requesting a Home Location Register (HLR) by e.g. a GMLC (Gateway Mobile Location Centre) to provide a network address of the MSC which is currently handling communications of the mobile terminal. Thereafter, the MSC may be requested to transmit location information indicating the location of the mobile terminal. In this set-up the HLR is repeatedly queried to provide the network address of the serving MSC.
As such set-up reduces network performance, there exists a need for efficiently retrieving location information indicating a location of a mobile terminal in a mobile communication network.